Saturday after midnight, on a street in the Vinohradar... The first rule of keeping safe in Ukraine is never share a taxi with people you don't know - but tonight the mistake was made for us; we missed the last trolleybus from Nivki metro, found a taxi instead, but two men climbed in after us. One was tall, in his late twenties, wearing a leather jacket and a black cap. He looked Central Asian, with narrow eyes and darker skin. The second was older, thin, unshaven, in a tracksuit and so overtaken by cheap vodka that he couldn't stop shivering. I crossed my arms in the middle seat, said nothing that would betray my accent, and scowled for the sake of it. We stopped at some traffic lights, opposite the metal fences with pro-Kuchma graffiti scrawled
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